Compare and contrast the poems Strange Meeting, by Wilfred Owen and I Have A Rendezvous With Death, by Alan Seeger

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Compare and contrast the poems Strange Meeting, by Wilfred Owen and I Have A Rendezvous With Death, by Alan Seeger

 

Strange Meeting is a poem by Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 and died in 1918. He wrote Strange Meeting in the winter before his death. Alan Seeger was born in 1888 and died in 1916, and wrote I Have A Rendezvous With Death in . Both poems are about a meeting of some ilk. Strange Meeting is set in Hell, and is about a soldier killed in battle speaking to another soldier that he himself killed. The second soldier responds with kindness and wisdom, which shows how the two of them, though on opposite sides in the war, are really the same. I Have A Rendezvous With Death is not set in any particular location – it relies on the interpretation and imagination of the reader to think up where it could be set. It supposedly set during the war and is presumably about a soldier reflecting and apparently wanting death.

The titles of both the poems have the same meaning in the sense that they are both meeting something. Strange Meeting represents an odd meeting of some sort, but is a fairly simple title and does not immediately communicate any striking ideas. I Have A Rendezvous With Death symbolises a meeting between a person and death. However, the use of the word “rendezvous” makes a reader think and feel that the voice of the poem thinks of death as a casual affair, something that they do not care about as when a person makes a “rendezvous” with another person, it’s never usually serious or bad. If Seeger had used a different word instead of “rendezvous”, a different impression would be given. For example, if he had used the term “appointment with death” or “engagement with death”, the reader would get the idea that the occasion of meeting death is more serious or more formal. “Rendezvous” is therefore a casual and odd term to associate with death. It also shows that the voice of the poem is expecting or knowing that they will die soon.

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Strange Meeting weakens the idea of war being glorious and great, possibly shown when Owen writes the pity of war’ as ‘the truth untold’. Repetition accentuates this view on war in the line ‘The pity of war, the pity war distilled’. The reader could be drawn to this line as it is one of the only five lines out of the forty four which is eleven syllables, rather then iambic pentameter. Also what could be drawn to the reader’s attention is the word ‘distil’. To distil something is to make it pure; here Owen could be signifying that although some people ...

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